Elon Musk

Is Elon Musk Scamming Chicago?

It’s not for nothing that Musk has been compared to the fast-talking salesman Lyle Lanley from The Simpsons, who bewitches Springfield with a promise to build the town a monorail. America’s city leaders are desperate to solve their infrastructure problems, and Musk offers a seductive sci-fi fix.

Like most large American metropolises, moving around Chicago necessitates a choice between frustrating transit options. For Chicagoans attempting to commute from downtown to O’Hare International Airport, however, there may soon be another way to travel that doesn’t involve packing onto the L train or driving down the expressway. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced plans with Elon Musk’s Boring Company to construct and operate an underground express service to the airport. The Chicago Express Loop, which will take passengers from downtown Chicago to the airport in just 12 minutes using electric vehicles that run through new twin underground tunnels, will be funded by the Boring Company, with no taxpayer subsidy.

Emanuel is expected to speak in more detail about the project on Thursday with Musk by his side, The New York Timesreports, but we already have the initial details. “Loop is a high-speed underground public transportation system in which passengers are transported on autonomous electric skates traveling at 125-150 miles per hour,” Boring’s Web site reads. “Electric skates will carry between 8 and 16 passengers, or a single passenger vehicle.” The skates will feature a climate-controlled cabin, Wi-Fi, luggage storage space, and are built on a modified Tesla Model X base frame. “Bringing Chicago’s economic engines closer together will keep the city on the cutting edge of progress, create thousands of good-paying jobs and strengthen our great city for future generations,” Emanuel told NBC Chicago in an e-mailed statement. “This transformative project will help Chicago write the next chapter in our legacy of innovation and invention.”

It’s not the Boring Company’s first proof of concept, though it will be its largest project to date. Originally conceived by Musk in order to improve his own commute (and create a revolutionary high-speed transportation system underneath the city of Los Angeles in the process), the Boring Company began with a single test tunnel under SpaceX’s parking lot in Hawthorne, California. He is currently negotiating the construction of a second tunnel in Los Angeles, which would ferry passengers from Dodger Stadium to Los Angeles International Airport in 10 minutes, instead of an hour on the freeway. (“If you build a tunnel in L.A., you can build one anywhere,” Musk recently said.) The Boring Company has also proposed another tunnel that would run between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., with future plans to build a more ambitious D.C. to New York Hyper-loop—Musk’s original concept—which would use air pressure to move transport pods at speeds as high as 600 miles per hour.

In the meantime, there the pesky matter of logistics to contend with in Chicago. A project like the one described by Musk and Emanuel appears to have never been constructed before, and Musk is bound to encounter skepticism from Chicagoans. City officials hope construction of the Loop can begin within the year, and that it will last less than three years. But city council members must first sign off on the project, and the Boring Company must still negotiate a contract with the city. There’s also the matter of how much more quickly the Loop could really get you to O’Hare: it’s a 12-minute ride, but how many cars would depart for the airport from Block 37, and how quickly? Even if cars depart every two minutes, that might accommodate 480 people an hour—as many people as might board two commercial jets. (A spokesperson for the company said that the shuttles would come more frequently than every two minutes.) O’Hare is already one of the world’s busiest airports; an expected expansion, the Times reports, could increase its gate capacity by 25 percent. Currently, the L train takes about 40 minutes to get to the airport and costs $7.50 for a roundtrip ride. The proposed Loop would cost significantly more, though probably not more than a trip in an Uber, Lyft, or taxi.

By Ray Tamarra/GC Images.

Musk, however, has a way of pulling people into his reality distortion field, where intercontinental travel is effortless; autonomous fleets of emission-free Tesla vehicles have replaced personal cars; each home generates its own solar power; and reusable rocket ships ferry paying passengers to and from Mars. As much as he is an engineering genius, Musk is also one of the world’s best salespeople. His cult of personality, it would seem, extends beyond his Tesla fanboys on Twitter, flamethrower customers and bullish Wall Street analysts, to include the Democratic mayor of Chicago, who is up for re-election early next year and has every incentive to appeal to his constituents by promising a simple technological fix to one of the city’s most intractable problems.

Musk is an idealist who, trite as it may be in Silicon Valley, actually does seem to want to make the world a better place. In many ways, he is already doing so. But there is also a whiff of opportunism to Musk’s endeavors, which prey on our desire to skip the hard work of repairing our crumbling public infrastructure and to replace it with some sci-fi contrivance that will put the United States back on the map. It’s not for nothing that Musk has been compared to the fast-talking salesman Lyle Lanley from The Simpsons, who bewitches Springfield with a promise to build the city its own monorail. America’s city leaders are desperate to solve their problems, and Musk offers a seductive technological fix.

It remains to be seen whether Musk proves prophetic or, like so many government contractors, ultimately runs over budget. Early estimates for the Boring Company tunnel in Chicago are close to $1 billion. That’s a lot of flamethrowers and branded hats. It’s also about as much money as New York City burned through to build less than one mile of subway track underneath Manhattan’s Upper East Side. If Musk can slash those costs the same way he revolutionized the rocket industry with SpaceX, the effect will be transformative. But Musk, as Tesla investors well know, often makes promises he can’t keep. If the Boring Company can’t deliver for Chicago, will other cities be as lenient as Wall Street has been with Musk?

This article has been updated to emphasize information made in The New York Times report.